System Integration & Test Engineers – Open Call (All Levels)

We're building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience. We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision‑making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.

Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 200 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe's fastest‑growing engineering businesses.

About the opportunity: This is an open call for Systems Integration & Test talent. We are hiring at several levels, including the discipline lead who will shape and grow it. Rowden already has an excellent systems engineering team, and we already integrate and test complex edge systems. However, the scale, pace and complexity of what we need to prove is changing and with it our demand for integration and test specialists.

Our systems bring together software, compute, networks, radios, sensors, user devices and increasingly autonomous behaviour. They have to work across denied, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth networks, where system behaviour shifts as connectivity and available resources shift. Right now, too much of our test infrastructure gets rebuilt for each project. It is often bespoke, manual and hard to reuse, which slows everyone down.

So, we are investing properly in SI&T. The goal is a world‑leading integration and test capability for edge information systems, built on reusable test and evaluation infrastructure rather than one‑off rigs. This will enable us to integrate earlier, test far more often, reproduce failures in minutes instead of weeks, and explore how systems behave in conditions that are difficult or impossible to create in the real world, using simulation and automation as first‑class tools. Executed well, this will significantly speed up the time it takes to get technology into users’ hands – and it will be more effective when it gets there.

Key areas of responsibility: We are deliberately keeping this broad, because we need strength at every level.

• System Integration & Test Discipline Lead: Someone to own SI&T as a discipline. Working with others in the Engineering team (Head of Systems, VP Engineering), you would set the technical vision for your area, decide where to focus effort, grow the people, and build the tooling, environments and engineering practices that let projects move faster. You need to understand testing deeply enough to know what good looks like, and be excited to designing and evolve a capability, rather than only operating a process. You will also stay close to the work – expect to be technically hands‑on, working alongside teams rather than only directing them.
• Principal and Senior SI&T Engineers: People to lead integration and test on significant programmes, and to build the reusable T&E capability the rest of the business will rely on. Test automation, instrumentation, simulation and emulation environments, network impairment, hardware‑in‑the‑loop, data capture and analysis. You will be hands‑on and you will set the standard others follow.
• SI&T Engineers: People to run integration and test activity on live projects, get real systems working together, find the failures early and work to resolve them.

What you’ll be doing: Understand complex systems in development and design the SI&T regime to ensure rigor and repeatability for rapidly iterating systems. At senior levels, this includes developing the Rowden standard approach for test design and execution, to be utilised across our portfolio. Integrate complex systems made up of software, compute, networks, radios, sensors and user devices, then prove they work under realistic conditions. Build reusable test and evaluation capability that works across projects. Automate test execution, data capture and analysis so teams get fast, trustworthy feedback. Set up simulation and emulation environments that let us explore system behaviour across contested and degraded networks. Reproduce awkward, intermittent failures quickly, and turn them into regression tests that stay. Work upstream with systems, software, hardware and product teams so testability is designed in. Develop and deploy a cross-Rowden method for capture and full lifecycle close of testing issues and defects, ensuring a closed loop process back into the design cycles. Set and raise the engineering standards for integration and test across the business.

Key skills, experience and behaviours: You will keep learning here, but some things you should already bring:

• Real experience integrating and testing complex, multi-disciplinary systems, ideally where software, hardware and networks all meet.
• Strong test engineering fundamentals. You know how to decide what is worth testing, and how to prove something rather than hope it works.
• For senior roles, demonstrable awareness of distributed communication systems. How they are deployed, how the trade‑offs between different communications bearers & spectrums will affect performance.
• Practical automation skills. Scripting and tooling, most likely in Python, plus CI pipelines, containers and version control.
• Experience with test infrastructure of some kind: hardware‑in‑the‑loop, simulation or emulation, network impairment, instrumentation, or automated test frameworks.
• An instinct for reuse. You build tools other people can pick up.
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. Our programmes move quickly and the requirements do not always arrive neatly.
• Clear communication with engineers, project teams and customers alike.

Useful, but not essential: RF, comms, EW or sensing experience. Defence, aerospace, space or other safety‑oriented backgrounds. Autonomy and robotics. Model‑based systems engineering, or formal V&V in a regulated environment.

You want to work on hard problems, at pace, with people who are very good at what they do. You would rather build something than inherit it. You are happy being told the current approach needs improving, because you will be one of the people improving it. And you care that what we ship actually works for the person using it at the far end of a bad network.

Working at Rowden: We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are! We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid‑working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part‑time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants. Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible. Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!